Dirt Day
By Ron Marr (04/12/03)
Many days on the calender which are worthy of a celebratory hootenannie. Robert E. Lee's Birthday, Groundhog Day, Thanksgiving, Cole Younger Days....Hell, once I even attended the Spud Festival in Shelly, Idaho.
This latter was a mistake on my part. It was my first foray into Idaho - the year 1993 - and I figured that a tater festival would involve lots of vodka. That's a laugh. The folks who had hired me to move to the land of massive tubers had neglected to inform that the state's southeast portion was largely under the dominion of radical factions of the LDS church. LDS members don't drink vodka (at least not in public) and all they celebrated in Shelly was taters.
I mean, the whole danged down was tater nutty. They baked 'em. They mashed 'em. They boiled 'em. They peeled 'em. They made whistles out of 'em. They dressed their taters up in tiny tater attire and outfitted them with bifocals, just so the tater-crazed residents could walk around making dumb comments like. "Had to get my tater some glasses 'cause his vision went bad. Get it? Taters have eyes? Yuck, yuck, yuck."
Oh yeah. The Shelly Spud Festival was the lost motherlode of humor. A veritable laugh riot comparable to witch burnings, fungal infections or a Whoopee Goldberg concert.
Well, that's a little harsh. There is not a single human in this galaxy less amusing than Whoopee Goldberg. In comparison to her unique comedic stylings, the sight of deranged Shelly residents having a tug-o-war in the giant mashed tater pit would appear mind-numbingly hilarious.
But I digress. We were talking about celebrations.
Most any occasion can be justified with a party, with the exception of the one which is right around the corner. Get ready. The Holy Grail of the kelp and bean sprout set will be soon upon us. A bunch of Sixties throwbacks will be crawling out of the woodwork, walking around blessing the beasts and the children while raving against hellish spawns of technology such as the microwave oven and dropping periodically to their knees in order to give Captain Planet a big ol' smack right on the lips.
You guessed it. Earth Day is April 22nd.
I did a little research into the origins of Earth Day, and discovered that the event first took place in 1970. I seem to remember this initial "happening," but since I was at the time working on my parent's farm, the mood to don a funny hat and join the counter-culture shindig was less than overwhelming. Maybe it was that 14 hours spent sitting on the tractor and getting choked by a cloud of dust that dampened my spirit. On the first Earth Day, I was ready to tell the Earth to go take a bath.
Anyway, Earth Day was founded by filthy hippies who had managed to avoid Vietnam via educational deferments. As most of these bug-covered students with an aversion to shampoo were far from home and out of their parent's whomping range, they got involved in numerous evil deeds. They had sit-ins and protests and burned down buildings and strolled around naked no matter how fat or ugly they were. They chanted and blew stuff up and got real twisted on a regular basis.
One day, maybe because they ran out of stuff to burn or because theie head-lice needed some sun, a few wiseacres decided that Mother Earth was in need of a caring nurturer, someone with the unselfish soul necessary to protect our spinning blue ball from the ravages of greedy industrialists and people with jobs.
Thus was invented Earth Day.
Hippies across America celebrated the first Earth Day with a vigor normally reserved for snake handlers or those whose frontal lobes resemble the Wreck of the Old 97. They did this by going outside and dancing joyfully in a big ol' Ring Around The Rosie circle, writhing and lurching in a Bacchanalian frenzy while wearing hair-wreaths comprised of dandelions and poison sumac. They cherished the limitless flora and fauna of our imperiled globe with the enthusiasm of a latter day Gregor Mendel who accidentally on purpose mistook the magic mushrooms for the pea pods, and honored all-giving, all-knowing Mama Earth by shooting up smack and urinating on the ground.
I'm really glad I was a farm boy in the Sixties and missed all this stuff. I missed a lot of the Seventies too, but that is another story not suitable for a family publication.
Be that as it may, the point of today's diatribe is merely to let you know that April 22nd is Earth Day. It's not really a big deal anymore. Old hippies hate this, and try and negate the fact that hardly anybody recognizes their stupid holiday by saying "Well, we enlightened the world so much that, now, EVERY day is Earth Day." Yeah, right. That's a little like me saying "The South didn't lose the war. We're just waiting for the second round."
Funny, as April 22nd approaches I feel the strangest urge for potatoes.
The liquid version, perferably.
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